This has release has been a massive team effort by many people over a long time. The wonderful community on these forums has been a big part of that team. This is your game, I hope you like it.

This version has the first major gameplay changes since 3.5.0. Some of these changes have significant impact on the game, and affect longstanding parts of the game quite radically. Given that aver 750 individual changes have been pushed to the main game repository since the last release, what is presented here will be more of a summary than a detailed changelog.

Traps

The general philosophy is that all players will hit traps at some time

Magical trap detection has been removed, except as a spell for mages

Active searching has been removed

Characters have one chance to detect a trap, on seeing the grid it is on; this chance is dependent on searching skill

Traps are either physical or magical, and there is a corresponding split in the player disarming skill

Many new traps have been introduced, and old ones amended

Traps are placed almost exclusively at corridor intersections or other chokepoints

Trap density in vaults is reduced by 75%

Identify

ID is now "rune-based"; once an object property is recognised once, it will always be recognised on all future items

The only forms of magical identify are scrolls and the mage spell, both of which identify a single unknown rune

All scrolls, potions, mushrooms are identified on their first use

Most wands, staffs and rods are identified on first use, the main exceptions being when they affect monsters and are tested in the absence of monsters

Ego item names become known once all the relevant runes are known

Player knowledge

Changes to previously known terrain outside the player's field of view (doors opening, etc) are no longer immediately known by the player

Secret doors are now always found on stepping adjacent (or at a distance by the mage spell)

Dungeon generation

A new generation algorithm has been introduced, and appears roughly as often as the classical generation algorithm

There are many new vaults in the new algorithm, and also new room types - huge rooms, rooms of chambers, and interesting rooms (like small vaults)

There is also an infrequently occurring generation type, the "moria level", which features large rough-edged rooms and many orcs, trolls and ogres

Lava has changed from being a visual curiosity in town in 4.0.x to being generated in the dungeon; it will burn those without fire immunity

Another new type of terrain has been introduced: passable rubble, which behaves like regular rubble except it can be walked through

Monsters

Monster breaths are now cone-shaped starting at the monster, instead of being indistinguishable from ball spells

Monster pathfinding has been improved (mostly), with monsters tracking explicitly by sight, sound or scent

The relationship between player stealth and monsters waking has changed

Random artifacts

Lights, rings and amulets are now fully randomised instead of based closely on the standard special artifacts

The artifact set generation algorithm has been changed so that random artifacts no longer correspond to individual standard artifacts, but rather are generated so as to get a statistically similar distribution

Calculation of object power has been simplified

Generating a set of random artifacts now actually writes a data file like artifact.txt, which can be used for future games

Curses

Sticky curses have been removed completely

A large number of new curses have been introduced

Items can have multiple curses

Curse removal targets individual known curses on items

Failed curse removal causes an item to become fragile

Fragile items have a chance to be destroyed on future failed curse removals

Status effects

Monster status effects have been redone to rebalance reliability and effectiveness, so that they may actually be interesting to use

New types of status-inducing spells and magic devices have been included

Other

Much more detail has been moved out to text files in lib/gamedata

Many underlying code improvements

__________________
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Last edited by Nick; June 25, 2017 at 23:08.
Reason: Now rephial is updated

Nice to see this out. 1st "bug" - rings of the mouse are free when they show up in the BM

2nd - the curse where weapons turn on you, doesn't show up when I inspect the weapon
3rd? - fired a sling pebble at a door that was out of light radius (closed as far as I know). It turned into a blank square

Glad to see the FA-ing of V continues apace. Please add Crows of Durthang/Udun next, and maybe storm of the night and Udun-spells for the late game?
Another thing that would be nice, given that moria type levels are already on their way in, would be adding theme levels. Those are always such great fun.